It used to be that you had one or two choices of bitters for all of your cocktail-mixing needs, but in the past few years, a craft cocktail popularity explosion has led to a veritable plethora of different small-batch, natural, and organic bitters options to explore.

Bitters are commonly used to add a touch of pizzaz to cocktails; Serious Eats calls them “the spice of the cocktail world,” both because they are made from spices and roots and because they serve the same role in cocktails as spices do in food: they add a hint of a different flavor that can complement the main ingredients and turn the drink into something entirely new and exciting.

But before they were added to the Old-Fashioned or the Manhattan, bitters were actually known as a natural solution to digestive woes in traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine.